Windows 7 is here! And for reasons I can't explain, it conjures up
memories of the Life Cereal commercial from the seventies. You remember?
It's the one with the kids giving their new, healthy cereal to the baby
brother proclaiming "Lets' get Mikey, he won't eat it, he hates everything!"
And then the astonished brothers are jubilantly shouting "He likes it! Hey
Mikey!"

Well, call me Mikey, but I think I like it too. Windows 7 that is!
There
are three basic flavors of Windows 7. They are: Windows 7 Home Premium,
Windows 7 Professional, and Windows 7 Ultimate. These are roughly the
equivalent of Windows XP home, Windows XP Professional, and Windows Media
Center, with some exceptions.

When Microsoft first introduced Media Center the target market was home
users and the target activity was TV/movie/video. The original target
market for XP Professional was office employees connected to a dedicated
server. And, if perchance, you were an office employee attached to a
dedicated server that also needed TV/movie/video, well, so sorry, you lose.
Because Media Center was never intended to be used in conjunction with a
network, and Professional was never planned to be heavy into TV/movie/video.
That is not a problem now. With each step up the Windows 7 ladder, all of
the
features in the lesser version are included. And from my point of view, I
like it! It was always cumbersome explaining to people why they couldn't
have both.

Other features with 7: 7 has taken the beauty of Vista and made it
prettier. It has taken the annoyances of Vista and hidden them or removed
them. It has taken the slowness of Vista and injected some adrenaline. But
what I am most excited about is the backward compatible mode, also known as
XP Mode, the purpose of which is to allow you to run older software under
the Windows XP operating system. There are some gotchyas with XP Mode.
For
instance, your processor has to be able to support virtualization and
systems with minimum requirements are not powerful enough to make this
happen. Plus, XP Mode is only available in the Professional and Ultimate
versions and it is still to early to tell just how compatible this will be,
but for now, I am excited. I'm thinking this may be a good thing and I
think
I'm going to like it!